


Four Times Wolfgang Punched Fascists and One Time the Rest of the Cluster Helped

by KinoGlowWorm



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Depictions of homophobia, Gen, Punching Nazis, depictions of racism, punching non-nazi identified fascists, punching the hell out of nazis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 20:12:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9511358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KinoGlowWorm/pseuds/KinoGlowWorm
Summary: Throughout his life, Wolfgang has been faced with people who try desperately to maintain their sense of power and control in the world through whatever kinds of force are available to them.He's punched several of them.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired to write this after reading Wolferfly's [Goodnight, White Pride](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9453398) (Yuri on Ice, my boys Otabek & Yuri P. punching Russian nazis).
> 
> I realized that not only would Wolfgang punch a nazi, he probably had. In fact, depending on how you read one of his flashbacks in Season 1, he has already done so in canon.
> 
> Also, reappropriating _Conan_ quotes in this context feels pretty good.

**Age 11**  
“Hey, you! Commie! Your shitty country’s ruining ours,” the tall, thin boy crowed down at him from a black jacket and a crest of red hair, leading a pod of his friends in their dark jackets. Among them, he recognized a boy from school, who had tried to pull something similar in the cafeteria. The boy had ended up bruised and bloody; Wolfgang had ended up in detention. “My dad says you’re costing us billions in taxes. You’re going to start paying us back, now.” 

Wolfgang stared back at him, unblinking, feet planted firmly on the asphalt. By the time he was eleven years old, Wolfgang was already a connoisseur of different kinds of harassment. In some ways, the public varieties were easier to take. A boy like this could only break his skin.

He dropped his glare only long enough to shoo Felix back, not wanting to drag him into what he knew was about to unfold. This wasn’t his fight. That was the problem with this kind of public aggression; it was never really about him. If they didn’t punch him, they’d punch someone else who reminded them of the same things. Someone who wasn’t as ready to take a punch, much less throw one back. Wolfgang knew just how much he could bear without breaking, and how hard he could turn it around. They tended not to come back to him, not alone at least, but the thought of them taking their rage and dropping it square on the head of whomever seemed insufficiently German - the more vulnerable the better - burned him cold. Nobody else deserved this kind of hate.

His fists tightened as he stood, and he stretched his shoulders lightly. He tensed his body against the first punch as it came, low, and his right arm crossed and connected solidly on the tallest boy’s body, knocking him down. 

The rest of the crew began to tear into him angrily, the fists and boots connecting with his body from all sides. Their blows hit with desperation rather than any sort of control, though, not that they knew the difference. He curled on the ground, trying to protect himself as he looked around for something to grab. Usually there weren’t this many, but the one in navy blue who had tried to take him in the cafeteria clearly hadn’t been ready to accept the insult of being taken down by some punk Ossi, much less one with a Russian name. 

Felix’s yell cut roughly through his thought. This wasn’t his fight. They had just met in detention the week before. And yet, here he was, screaming and swinging a piece of rusted pipe at these shitheads for all he was worth. A few solid hits later the whole crew was running from the two boys.

“No one will remember if we were good men or bad,” Felix yelled after them. As they disappeared from view down the crumbling concrete of the alleyway, he added softly, “Only that two stood against many.”

 **Age 15**  
Wolfgang found his boots pointed toward the grocery before he realized entirely where he was going. There wasn’t anything too unusual about it. Bizim Bakkal was the one of the closest groceries to Felix’s mom’s apartment and had some of the neighborhood’s best kebab to boot. The fact that the couple that ran the place had a daughter just a little older than him who might as well have carried the constellations in her long, dark hair for all that he was concerned and who worked the register occasionally didn’t hurt his regular patronage either.

His daily grocery runs had thoroughly charmed Felix’s mother, Hanne, as well, though she’d initially welcomed him into the apartment with a weary skepticism when he’d joined them about six weeks ago.

It was just past sundown when he turned the corner onto the busier street where the store was, just barely dark enough for the streetlights to have come on. The store was a block down from where he turned onto the street. He could make out the paint, like a bloodstain on the wall, before he saw the dark-clad silhouettes move.

 _Deutscher Bo-_ Was as much as they had finished that wasn’t covered by their bodies, but it didn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to know where it was headed: _Deutscher Boden_ , German Soil. Bold. Too fucking bold. The store was still open, for fuck’s sake. It wasn’t even totally dark yet. Did they really imagine they wouldn’t get caught at this or did they not care? 

Wolfgang picked up his pace very slightly, his feet falling just a little heavier. No one who wasn’t walking just beside him would have noticed the shift in his gait, and the street was otherwise empty right now. It was bad enough they were defacing the grocery - his grocery - but to smear it with this kind of nationalistic bullshit was too much. Especially when, by the looks of them, they couldn’t have even been born when Emine’s parents had first opened the store. Neither of the two looked much older than he was, for all their bald-headed posturing.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded as he pulled the first of the two back by the shoulder, turning him around. He didn’t wait for an answer before pushing him back against the wall and swinging his right arm into his gut. The can of paint fell to the ground with a hollow ping. As the one doubled over, the other tried to grab Wolfgang’s arms, but he quickly swept the feet out from under the other attacker, landing him roughly on his back. He delivered a few more strong blows to the first of the vandals.

As he slid down the side of the building, arms crossed in front of him, he picked up the second roughly by the front of the shirt, delivering one solid punch across the jaw before dropping him again. 

“Get the fuck over yourselves. These guys do more for the neighborhood than pieces of shit like you can even imagine,” he yelled before hearing the voice behind him.

He turned around to see Ahmet, one of the store’s owners, waving with both hands. Wolfgang’s disgusted anger suddenly grew self-conscious. How long had he been standing there? 

“Come here, son,” Ahmet called towards him, his voice warm. He didn’t know his name, but with how often he comes into the store, he must have known his face by now.

Wolfgang walked towards where Ahmet was still standing, right by the concrete stoop leading into the store.

“I’m sorry they messed up your store,” he said, looking down at his feet. “I wasn’t able to stop them in time.”

“You did more than most would,” Ahmet said, putting an arm around his shoulder. “Come on inside, let’s go get you something to eat, on me.”

 **Age 19**  
The crowd on the dancefloor moved with the pulse of the music in the dim, shifting colors of the light; a single, contiguous organism floating through the heavy, humid air. As far as Wolfgang was concerned, that was half the point of being here to move as part of a larger whole to the point where you could almost ignore yourself, almost ignore that you had a self. He felt tied to the bodies around him through the deep beat he could feel moving through his own like a wave, like it were part of his own bloodstream. Though the combination of alcohol and MDMA in his system didn’t lessen the effect.

There was an angry voice somewhere off to the side of him that he felt as much as he heard. It wasn’t loud enough for him to make out any of the words, for it to distract him. Suddenly, something interrupted the smooth flow of energy around him as another man smashed into him out of rhythm, with much more force than the sway of the music would suggest.

“What the fuck?” he muttered with disgust as he stumbled backwards, feeling as though he’d been ripped from the warmth of the larger moment.

“Sorry,” he saw the man mouth at him, barely making eye contact, his dark curls, sweaty from dancing, falling into his face as he caught his balance. The man reached back for the woman he’d been dancing with, a thickly-built blonde woman whose clothes lovingly hugged the curves of her body, and she pulled him in close to her again, wrapping her arms around his neck. A moment later, the same man slammed into him again and the sharpness of the angry voice hit him almost as hard.

“Stay the fuck away from her,” he yelled into the face of the man who had just picked himself up for the second time, the sharp angles of his face flushed red around a sneer. The woman with him tried to put herself between them.

“Leave him the fuck alone,” she yelled back, trying to put herself between them.

“Is there a problem here?” Wolfgang asked, slipping loosely between them, a hand resting lightly on the chest of the man who had been yelling.

“Yeah, this fucking _Kanacke_ is dancing with my sister,” he spat, swatting Wolfgang’s hand away. Wolfgang looked back at the couple behind him. Nothing about their body language suggested that there was anything less than enthusiastic about the way they were curled around each other.

“Did you ask your sister if it was a problem?” he asked, head checking back over his shoulder, “because it doesn't look like she's anywhere she doesn't want to be.”

He wasn’t sure he’d even heard all of his question, but Wolfgang already knew the answer. There was no way he could answer that question in words. When the man’s fist flew, it wasn’t clear whether it was intended for Wolfgang or the darker-skinned man behind him. At that point, it didn’t matter too much. His disgust with everything about how the man had approached this had already hijacked the buzz he’d had going. 

Wolfgang barely flinched as the punch hit his shoulder, rocking gently around it instead. He punched back, quick and sharp, into the man’s gut just hard enough to break his attention. As he doubled over, he grabbed him by the slick charcoal fabric of his shirt forced him back through the mass of people still moving together, trying to avoid any more damage to the crowd than had already been done.

This type of guy. It was hard to tell where his stated concern for his sister turned into his own pride, though on some level it didn’t matter. The two were never actually separate for someone like this, who thought that trying to jump the guy in a busy club would make a difference. No, his sister’s date was a challenge to his sense of control over his world. He couldn’t fucking see either of them as people.

It was almost not worth his time to do anything more than deliver the man, still hunched uncomfortably in front of him, to the bouncers by the door. But the bouncers had to be nice, or at least professional. As they approached the doors, he pushed him roughly to the floor in front of them.

“The fuck we’re supposed to do with this?” asked one of the bouncers.

“This fucker punched me,” the guy whined, but didn’t attempt to stand up.

“Asshole can’t deal with the fact that his sister has a date,” he said, “threw a punch at me. Take out the fucking trash. That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

With that, he turned to head back into the clubroom. He checked back over his shoulder and saw two of the bouncers pushing him, ungently, out the door into the street.

 **Age 23**  
“You had to tell that story right then,” Wolfgang chuckled exasperatedly as he and Felix stumbled down the street from Sofia, the bar where these nights always seemed to end after the other clubs started closing down for the night. 

“What?” Felix squawked defensively. 

“I’m just saying that if you could resist telling a story that involves eating bull testicles, you might be leaning on something a little prettier than me, right now.” It wasn’t entirely clear how he and Felix were managing to stay upright given the number of drinks they had in them, not that he could put a number on it. Wolfgang certainly had no idea, on either count, but he worried that if he thought about it too hard, they might lose whatever magic was keeping them up. Arms thrown around each other’s shoulders, they leaned into each other as they walked down the street. The warmth of his friend’s skin was comforting, lightly coated in sweat though it might be. There was a sharp chill in the air that hadn’t been there when they’d gone out, but that had been before dark.

“Haha, you know there’s no one prettier than you, Wolfie,” Felix laughed.

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Wolfgang grinned back. The cool air was starting to clear his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a trio of men walking towards them, shoulder to shoulder, hands in pockets, pants tucked into their boots. He thought he saw one of them try to make eye contact briefly, but just as quickly as he’d noticed, it was gone.

“Fucking _Schwuchteln_ ,” he heard one mutter in a low growl of a voice as they came closer, but he didn’t think much of it. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone had suggested - derisively or otherwise - that he and Felix were a couple, especially the way that Felix got cuddly with both feet in the bag like this, idly flirting with anything that would listen. He rolled his eyes but tried to ignore it, which worked until the one on the end threw a shoulder into his as they passed by on the sidewalk.

“The fuck was that?” Felix yelled as the both of them turned around. 

“You know what that was about, pig,” the tallest of the three spat back at him, taking a few steps in their direction. Looking at him more closely, Wolfgang recognized the jagged rune of the Thor Steinar logo on his jacket and swore under his breath. Fucking Nazis. “It’s bad enough we have to put up with having your kind around, but you can’t even have enough decency to keep your hands off each other in public. It’s sickening.”

“I know you’re just jealous because you’re not getting any, but you don’t have to take it out on the more fortunate like that,” Felix said. He never could resist digging into someone’s misplaced self-righteousness like this, and didn’t care what it meant for his own dignity. In a number of ways, it was a quality that Wolfgang admired in him, even though it often meant he was going to have to help him fight his way out of whatever hole he’d dug. As the tall fucker’s friends took a few more steps in their direction, he hoped he wasn’t too drunk to help him out of this one.

He was standing on his own two feet, now. It didn’t seem as challenging as it had a moment ago, before they’d seen this crew. It hadn’t been important, then. His eyes tracked the sound of cracking knuckles to the man on his left as the three stood facing them, as in military formation.

Wolfgang rolled his head side to side and took a deep breath. The corner of his mouth turned up ever so slightly.

“Oh, you going to fight us, _Schwuchtel_?” the tall one asked in a bemused tone, eyeing Wolfgang’s stance. 

“That’s not up to me, right now,” Wolfgang replied evenly. 

“You going to fight me if I punch your girlfriend?” he asked. In response, Wolfgang only shrugged silently, his arms loose and ready at his sides. 

The bald one on the right took a few steps forward and made a lazy grab at Felix in a grave underestimation. Even a number of drinks in - perhaps even more so, then - Felix fought with a long-armed frenetic approach. He was a windmill with slightly better tactics. What he lacked in precision, he made up for in intensity. Felix’s feet swept the one man’s feet out from under him. He stumbled forward, leading with his fists, as the man landed flat on the ground.

The other two descended on Wolfgang. He got a solid right cross to the one man’s jaw, leaving him to stumble back a few steps so he could take on the other one. A few minutes later found the three attackers on the ground, clutching parts of themselves and groaning. Wolfgang’s face stung, and he could feel blood oozing from his lip. 

Felix was also on the ground, flat on his back and Wolfgang rushed to crouch next to him.

“Are you alright?” he asked nervously. Felix seemed to have caught a hard blow that left his eyebrow bleeding. He’d noticed one of them had some kind of big ring.

“Oh, I’m fine, I’m just tired,” he said with a plainness that surprised Wolfgang. “The sidewalk’s just so nice and cool right now.”

Wolfgang laughed, and offered Felix a hand up.

“Come on, we should actually get to bed,” he said, pulling his friend up. Their arms fell around each other’s shoulders again as they walked away from the three groaning attackers, humbled on the sidewalk. It wasn’t clear if the physical pain or the forced humility of being taken down by what they still thought was a gay couple that kept them down, but Wolfgang suspected some of both. He hoped some of the humility stuck as they left them behind.

 **Age 27**  
The streets were full of people, yelling from behind their signs, reading things like _Go Home, Berlin Needs Security, Nonviolent and United Against the War of Faith on German Soil_. A number depicted chancellor Angela Merkel in a hijab with the text _Merkel Must Go_. Wolfgang was sure he caught a couple of Iron Cross flags in the crowd. That is always where this anti-immigrant shit went, however big a deal they made about being nonviolent or rejecting the trappings of Nazi ideology, that flag was still there, whether you could see it or not.

“Oh fucking hell, no,” Wolfgang heard Nomi say from just behind him. He felt the pressure of sixteen fists clenching among them before they pushed forward into the crowd.

**Author's Note:**

> Also, thanks to scaredofuhlek for help with some of the German words.


End file.
